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Richard Nixon Looking Inward EPISODE Richard Nixon Looking inward EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. BOB WOODWARD: The day he resigned, he called all of his aides and friends and family to the West Wing of the White House just before he left on the helicopter – a couple of hours before he actually left office through resignation. And he had his wife and daughters and son-in-laws there, and it was a rambling talk about the grievances he felt. His mother wasn't treated right. His father was poor. And then at one point, he raised and kind of with his hand indicated, 'This is why I called you all here.' And then he said, 'Always remember: Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.' It was the hate that was the poison that destroyed him in his presidency. And at that moment, to his credit, he understood it. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's Bob Woodward, one of the Washington Post reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon's presidency. I'm Lillian Cunningham also with The Washington Post, and this is the 36th episode of “Presidential.” PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This episode is going to focus on Watergate and Nixon's resignation -- looking at what it was about Nixon's personality and his view of power that ultimately led to, as he said, a sort of self-destruction. I do think some early biography is always important, though. So, before I turn back to Bob Woodward, I'm going to tell just the short version of Nixon's pre-presidency story. So, Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913, and his family lived on a lemon ranch. But the ranch failed while he was still a child, and it left his family in financial distress. So, they moved to a nearby town when he was about nine-years old, and his family ran a gas station that was part grocery store. His father was supposedly a pretty aggressive, angry guy. And his Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 mother was the gentler one. She was a devout Quaker. They had five sons. And Richard was the second. But two of Richard's brothers died from illnesses while they were boys. Now, Nixon was a great student all through high school. He actually won an award and a scholarship to attend Harvard. But because his family didn't have enough money for the additional expenses of sending him there, he instead went to the local college, Whittier College. And while he was there, he was president of the student body. He won that election mostly because he supported having dances on campus. Very cute. But he actually always had something of an affinity for the arts. In addition to debate and student politics, he played several instruments throughout his life, and he was also always interested in theater. In fact, he later met his wife Pat because they were both cast in a production of 'The Dark Tower,' a sort of mystery drama put on by a small theater company. Anyway, he went to law school at Duke University on a scholarship and then he joined a law firm back in his hometown after he didn't get some of the more high-profile jobs he applied for, including a job at the FBI. Then in World War II, he joined the Navy. And once the war was over, he returned to California, and that's when he really started to get into politics. And he ran for a seat in Congress in 1946. Now, he won that seat as a Republican in a big upset against a five-term Democratic congressman. And from that point on, he has a very fast political rise. He serves that first term in Congress, and then he runs for a Senate seat in 1950, and he wins that as well. Then, only two years after that, Dwight Eisenhower picks Nixon as his vice presidential running mate in the 1952 election. Of course, they go on to win the election. And this makes Nixon vice president at only 40-years old. It's worth pointing out, though, that along the way, he starts to gain a reputation for negative campaigning -- he seems to be winning a lot of these races mostly by attacking his opponents and finding their weaknesses, rather than focusing on his merits as a candidate. Alright, so he's vice president for two terms, and then once Eisenhower is ready to leave office, Nixon tries to move from the vice presidency to being president himself. So, he runs in the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy, but he ends up losing. Kennedy beats him by the smallest popular vote margin in U.S. history. And that loss deeply stung and shaped Nixon. He wrote later in his memoirs that: 'From this point on, I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money and by the license they were given by the media. I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them or anyone on the level of political tactics.' That loss was followed two years later by another loss, when he ran for governor of California in 1962. After that defeat, Nixon gave a famous press conference, where he said to the media, 'You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.' But after several years of licking his wounds, he was back. In 1968, he ran for president again, and this time against Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey. And Nixon wins. OK, so there are, of course, many things other than Watergate that we could discuss about Nixon's Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 presidency, which started in 1969 and ended with his resignation in 1974. Most notably, Nixon tends to get a lot of credit for his foreign policy achievements. He made a historic trip to China that set the U.S. and China on a course to more peaceful relations. He also struck an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit the number of nuclear missiles that they had. And he signed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended America's military involvement in the Vietnam War. But he is also the only president in American history to resign the office of the presidency. So, we're going to talk about that. And the person we're going to talk about that with is, as I said, Bob Woodward. He was one of the most influential reporters in uncovering the scandals of the Nixon White House that led to the resignation. And I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to use this episode to ask his reflections on Nixon's downfall. Now, if we flash back to 1972, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were two junior reporters at The Post. They're now often described as having broken the biggest story in American politics. What happened was that they started looking into a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that were at the Watergate building complex here in D.C., and their effort to find out who was responsible for the burglary ultimately led them all the way to the presidency itself. In the four decades since then, Woodward has continued to unearth even more on Nixon. Just last year, he published a book called 'The Last of the President's Men,' which revealed a trove of new documents and previously untold stories from Alexander Butterfield. Butterfield was the aide to Nixon who originally disclosed that the president had a secret audio taping system, and this is what provided the main evidence for Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal. So, without further ado, with me here in The Washington Post studio is Bob Woodward. Bob, thank you so much for doing this. BOB WOODWARD: Thank you. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: To start, could you paint sort of a psychological portrait of Nixon, the man? If you were to distill him down to a few traits that you think really shaped and defined him, what would some of those be? BOB WOODWARD: Well, of course, we have these thousands of hours of secret tape recordings that have become public as a result of the Watergate investigation, and there's much more about him, not just on Watergate, but on Vietnam, on domestic policies, his relationship. So, there is a psychiatric portrait of him that emerges. And what you see is a great deal of paranoia -- that he converted the office of the presidency almost to an instrument of personal revenge; that he would use the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, even the Secret Service, any instrument of government to get back at the people who were real enemies or perceived enemies. And so, he strayed off the path of what the presidency is about. A presidency has to not look inward, but outward. A president must define what the next stage of good is for a majority of people out there. Not for him, not for her. He was so obsessed with himself that he didn't figure out what the job was, and he thought it somehow was central that he retain power. Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you have a sense of where that came from -- the paranoia and that sort of sense of vengeance? BOB WOODWARD: He was a street fighter in politics -- when he ran for Congress the first time in the ‘40s, when he ran for the Senate, when he ran for vice president.
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